Social Practice

I believe that racism is a system, and the values are passed down, upheld, and reinforced through mass communication with catastrophic results;
it is the basis of many structural violence we see in the world today.
その歪んだ価値観だけを人種差別と言うのではなく、メディアによって補強されている現状のシステムそのものだという見方をした場合、
どういうことかなのか…
それは個人が差別する・しないとは別に、社会と経済の構造自体が世の中に蔓延る構造的な暴力の基盤であるということ。

SOCIAL PRACTICE

They All Look The Same

This performance piece is a critique on systemic aggression towards minority groups, first herding them like cattle drive into check-off-boxes called race, then 'clumping' them together as a category, which often leads to an experience of alienation and marginalization from society. The piece was performed in front of the Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley, the place where Mario Savio gave the famous speech "Operation of the Machine" in 1964. As Donald Trump stoked the fires of racist rhetoric, I was summoned by a call to action against the systemically amplified xenophobia.

These are the sounds of distress.
During the performance, I was patching and rerouting wire patch cables on the spot to make sounds and noise. It was done without any premeditation or rehearsal but that was intentional, creating additional layers of stress, emotional and physical tension.

I used an open source semi-modular synthesizer that runs on two Attiny 85 chips that can be reprogrammed with an Arduino.

In post-production, I transposed archive footages from MSNBC denouncing Trump's xenophobic speeches. He calls Mexicans 'rapists', and blames the Chinese for "taking jobs away". Like many talking heads, he omits talking about the fact that American business owners are responsible, too, for giving the jobs away.
Exploitation is foundational to capitalism, and brutality is by its design. All parties involved are part of the transaction of "giving" the jobs away and "taking" the jobs up. The point of the performance was not to point blaming fingers (because the participants are not the only ones to blame), but to spotlight the contradiction of our political and economic system.
The rhetoric was eerily reminiscent of the blame shift that lead to the harrowing Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

Institution as the performance venue

dissenting racism through parody and parafiction

Indeed, they all do look the same, in this case literally; they're all me.
And figuratively, we are all the same people.
The phrase "they all look the same" comes from a derogatory remark that I heard over and over growing up.
I saw it being directed towards "black" people, "brown" people, "yellow" people, and even "white" people.
It divides people and robs us our humanity across the board.
The idea for this performance came to me during the height of the 2016 elections, when hate was being stoked unprecedentedly due to the saturation of visualization by the corporate media (and social media); it pitted the people of North America against each other.

Xeno the Alien

Unarmed...Don't Shoot!
A performance piece in rememberance of Oscar Grant. I hope that more people would come to recognize the problems that are structural and see beyond localized perception, superficial and bigoted assumptions.

Fruitvale BART/Public transportation stations as the performance venue

SPACE/VENUE performances

Synthesizer shop as the performance venue

Warehouse as the performance venue
(performing with DPS-1, interactive visual projection using video synthesis technique)

Documentary

What Elephant?
A collaboration project I worked on with UC Berkeley students. This is a two-part documentary film as a discourse on race. (2018)

PART I:
The COLOR of People - A Brief Inquiry into Whiteness and People of Color

PART II:
The Secret of Affirmative Action -A Further Inquiry into Whiteness

BLOG

#XENOPHOBIADISCOURSE
1) A platform for discourse on xenophobia, capitalism, and mainstream media.
2) A place to find collaborators for making participatory art.

screenshot of the blog/website

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